Hi, my name is Krzysztof (Chris),
Born in Wołomin and have been living in Kobyłka almost my entire life. They are both pretty small cities close to Warsaw, where not much is ever happening, that’s why I’m currently moving to Warsaw.
I speak English, Polish, and a little bit of German, which I was recently trying to get to know better, but since joining the LizardFS team, I haven’t had much time to do so and focus more on thousands of lines of code. There were also times of my life, in which I was learning Spanish, Russian and Italian, so I’d probably understand some basic phrases, but nothing more than that.
Mostly my experience is in C++, in which I’ve been programming for more than 10 years, since secondary school where I started participating in algorithmic contests. I’ve also programmed professionally in Python and Javascript and their web frameworks. Besides that, I’ve done a couple of medium-sized projects in C and Java and single ones in several other languages.
I attended the same secondary and high school in Warsaw, where I spent 6 years. Later I studied Computer Science and Maths at the University of Warsaw and got BSc in both.
During my studies, I had a couple of internships and part-time jobs in various types of projects – from web development to machine learning programming on GPU.
I also worked at Intel but didn’t like it there very much, so I didn’t stay there for long. Thus, LizardFS is my first job in which I’d like to stay for longer than a couple of months ?
I think that although I worked on a couple of bigger projects in my professional career, they weren’t extraordinarily interesting. Out of them, LizardFS looks definitely the best.
Previously the best project I’ve worked on is quite a small one, a thing that I wrote with 3 other guys as our bachelor’s thesis. Coding-wise it wasn’t big, but we needed to do lots of research and implement complicated compression algorithms. The biggest value for me was the people in our team. They were all extraordinarily talented developers, after university they all haven’t had any problems getting jobs in the most sought after companies for developers, and during that year of work with them, I’ve learned a lot(Really) about coding, but most importantly, work ethic and the way one should think while developing software.
So far in my career, I haven’t really experienced anything bad yet. Only my job at Intel that was a bit disappointing – there was lots of corporate stuff I didn’t like and tasks I was given were quite different from what I was promised during the recruitment process.
LizardFS used to be very very stable, which was its biggest strength. The latest release, which added lots of functionality, compromised it a little, that’s why our biggest priority is to fix a couple of bugs that were introduced at that time to bring back the stability. Afterward, besides adding new functionalities, I see lots of possibilities to enhance Lizard’s speed and throughput, even though it’s not bad right now in comparison to our competitors. More is always better right?
I think it’s definitely possible for LizardFS to become one of the most renowned solutions in its genre, not inferior to its competitors in any way, and better in some. That, together with it being open-source, makes me hope it will be commonly used, also by large companies on a big scale, with thousands of nodes. It would be very rewarding and I’d feel very proud of being a member of the team.
LinkedIn
Github
Although especially during CS studies I’ve written a lot of code in various projects containing hundreds of lines of code, unfortunately, I’ve never really felt the need to use git, that’s why there’s not much stuff on my Github. I’m really regretting it now, because of that I lost most of the code I wrote. You live and learn!
LizardFS developer’s article #3
